Tuesday, January 29, 2013

In a previous life, I worked for a university that was broke. Not broke in the sense that it was falling apart, but broke in the sense that we had to make a lot of our own tools. This meant no SCCM, no Ghost (does anyone even still use it?), etc. There are dozens of labs and had a clunky imaging solution that we rolled ourselves based on SQL Express, VBScript, and WinPE distributed by PXE Linux on a CentOS box. Certainly a very clunky scenario. When I was made the lead on the campus-wide Windows 7 rollout, I knew I needed to get a fresh start on this.

To capture or not to capture?
One of the great religious battles of our day (as far as desktop imaging goes) is whether or not capturing a reference image and sysprepping, or deploying a standard "thin" image and installing the necessary applications through another means is the best way to go.

I purposely do not name my employer here and any reference to it is stripped from scripts/code before it is posted. This blog and all related links and profiles are entirely my own. My opinions, beliefs, rants, etc are completely mine and are not indicative of the beliefs of my employer.